Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece

Kurt A. Raaflaub

Publication Year: 2007

This book presents a state-of-the-art debate about the origins of Athenian democracy by five eminent scholars. The result is a stimulating, critical exploration and interpretation of the extant evidence on this intriguing and important topic. The authors address such questions as: Why was democracy first realized in ancient Greece? Was democracy "invented" or did it evolve over a long period of time? What were the conditions for democracy, the social and political foundations that made this development possible? And what factors turned the possibility of democracy into necessity and reality? The authors first examine the conditions in early Greek society that encouraged equality and "people’s power." They then scrutinize, in their social and political contexts, three crucial points in the evolution of democracy: the reforms connected with the names of Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes in the early and late sixth and mid-fifth century. Finally, an ancient historian and a political scientist review the arguments presented in the previous chapters and add their own perspectives, asking what lessons we can draw today from the ancient democratic experience. Designed for a general readership as well as students and scholars, the book intends to provoke discussion by presenting side by side the evidence and arguments that support various explanations of the origins of democracy, thus enabling readers to join in the debate and draw their own conclusions.

Cover

Title Page, About the Series, Copyright

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Paul Cartledge received his DPhil from Oxford in 1975. He is currently Professor of Greek History in the Faculty of Classics and Professorial Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. His main interests are Greek social,political, and cultural history, Sparta’s history through the ages, and the continuing ...

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

1 Introduction

Over the past thirty years or so, work on Athenian democracy has intensiWed
and yielded most impressive results. The development and functioning of
democratic institutions and of the democratic system as a whole, as well as
individual aspects, such as the roles of the elite, leaders, and the masses, and
democratic terminology, have been analyzed and reconstructed in detail.
The sources relevant to the...

2 “People’s Power” and Egalitarian Trends in Archaic Greece

Democracy is constituted through institutions, practices, mentalities, and,
eventually, ideologies. In Greece these different components of democracy
reached their fullest development in the Wfth and fourth centuries. If
democracy means that all citizens, the entire demos, determine policies and
exercise control through assembly, council, and courts, and that political
leaders, attempting to shape...

3 Revolutions and a New Order in Solonian Athens and Archaic Greece

This chapter discusses the history of political and legal reform, mass revolution,
and the reports of various people’s governments in Greece during
the archaic period. Its greater focus on Athens is dictated by the state of our
evidence, meager in any case but more extensive for that city, and by
Athens’ importance in the history of democracy. At the same time, many
scattered references in Aristotle’s...

4 “I Besieged That Man”: Democracy's Revolutionary Start

In searching for the “origins of Athenian democracy” I have avoided the
individualist, institutionalist, and foundationalist premises undergirding
much historical work on Athenian political history.1 My approach to the history
of Athenian democracy cares relatively little for the motivations of
Cleisthenes or (e.g.) Solon, Ephialtes, Pericles, or Demosthenes, since I do
not think that democracy was “discovered” or “invented” by an individual.
Rather I suppose that these (and...

5 The Breakthrough of Demokratia in Mid-Fifth-Century Athens

In the years around 462 b.c.e., Athens was rocked by political turmoil.
Members of the venerable Areopagus council were brought to trial, as was
Cimon, after Aristides architect of the Athenian empire and long-dominant
general and leader. Some politicians, led by Ephialtes, persuaded the assembly
to pass measures, often called the reforms of Ephialtes, that shifted certain
powers from the Areopagus...

6 Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate

“The study of the Athenian political order is today one of the most exciting
and active areas of ancient Greek history.” So wrote Josh Ober Wfteen
years ago, reviewing Raphael Sealey’s typically revisionist and iconoclastic
Athenian Republic: Democracy or the Rule of Law? 1 In 1994 Lisa Kallet (-Marx),
reviewing a number of the many works prompted by the notional 2,500th
anniversary of the reforms...

7 Power to the People

Why think that the “first democracy” has anything to tell us about our own?
That was then and this is now; surely modern democracy has diverged from
its ancient counterpart, and deliberately and rightly so?1 As it happens, however,
among people who spend their time pondering such matters, dissatisfaction
with modern democracy quite often takes the form of what one wit
has dubbed “polis envy.”2 We...

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